Eastern Pequot Archaeological Field School, 2003 - 2013

The Eastern Pequot Archaeological Field School began in 2003 as a cooperative effort between Anthropology Professor Stephen Silliman and the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation, a Native American community in southeastern Connecticut. It uses a six-credit summer archaeological field course to achieve four objectives set within a model of community-engaged scholarship

Conversations Between Communities: UMass Boston Archaeology for and with the Nipmuc Nation & the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation

Community-engaged scholarship, learning, and service are becoming important parts of university missions, ensuring that academic projects do not just “take” but also give back in meaningful ways. For Native American communities and archaeologists who come from and work with them, this kind of research sensitivity and community accountability is fundamentally important. Archaeological projects with, by, and for Native American communities vary as much in their structures and goals as the communities themselves. In order to meet the desires and needs of each community, two archaeological field schools at UMass Boston – Hassanamesit Woods (Grafton, Massachusetts) and Eastern Pequot (North Stonington, Connecticut) – have employed different levels of consultation and collaboration to engage the Nipmuc and the Eastern Pequot communities in the archaeology conducted on their lands. Similarities and differences between artifacts unearthed speak to each community’s unique experiences over the last 400 years, providing new insights to spark conversations between these indigenous groups and the archaeologists and students who work with them. The artifacts discovered fall into four main categories – connections to a deeper past, foodways, architecture, and daily lives – that broadly encapsulate life at a Nipmuc homesite and at several 18th- and 19th-century households on the Eastern Pequot reservation

Non-Linearity in Ecosystem Services: Temporal and Spatial Variability in Coastal Protection

Natural processes tend to vary over time and space, as well as between species. The ecosystem services these natural processes provide are therefore also highly variable. It is often assumed that ecosystem services are provided linearly (unvaryingly, at a steady rate), but natural processes are characterized by thresholds and limiting functions. In this paper, we describe the variability observed in wave attenuation provided by marshes, mangroves, seagrasses, and coral reefs and therefore also in coastal protection. We calculate the economic consequences of assuming coastal protection to be linear. We suggest that, in order to refine ecosystem-based management practices, it is essential that natural variability and cumulative effects be considered in the valuation of ecosystem services

Analysis of shared heritability in common disorders of the brain

ience, this issue p. eaap8757 Structured Abstract INTRODUCTION Brain disorders may exhibit shared symptoms and substantial epidemiological comorbidity, inciting debate about their etiologic overlap. However, detailed study of phenotypes with different ages of onset, severity, and presentation poses a considerable challenge. Recently developed heritability methods allow us to accurately measure correlation of genome-wide common variant risk between two phenotypes from pools of different individuals and assess how connected they, or at least their genetic risks, are on the genomic level. We used genome-wide association data for 265,218 patients and 784,643 control participants, as well as 17 phenotypes from a total of 1,191,588 individuals, to quantify the degree of overlap for genetic risk factors of 25 common brain disorders. RATIONALE Over the past century, the classification of brain disorders has evolved to reflect the medical and scientific communities' assessments of the presumed root causes of clinical phenomena such as behavioral change, loss of motor function, or alterations of consciousness. Directly observable phenomena (such as the presence of emboli, protein tangles, or unusual electrical activity patterns) generally define and separate neurological disorders from psychiatric disorders. Understanding the genetic underpinnings and categorical distinctions for brain disorders and related phenotypes may inform the search for their biological mechanisms. RESULTS Common variant risk for psychiatric disorders was shown to correlate significantly, especially among attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder (MDD), and schizophrenia. By contrast, neurological disorders appear more distinct from one another and from the psychiatric disorders, except for migraine, which was significantly correlated to ADHD, MDD, and Tourette syndrome. We demonstrate that, in the general population, the personality trait neuroticism is significantly correlated with almost every psychiatric disorder and migraine. We also identify significant genetic sharing between disorders and early life cognitive measures (e.g., years of education and college attainment) in the general population, demonstrating positive correlation with several psychiatric disorders (e.g., anorexia nervosa and bipolar disorder) and negative correlation with several neurological phenotypes (e.g., Alzheimer's disease and ischemic stroke), even though the latter are considered to result from specific processes that occur later in life. Extensive simulations were also performed to inform how statistical power, diagnostic misclassification, and phenotypic heterogeneity influence genetic correlations. CONCLUSION The high degree of genetic correlation among many of the psychiatric disorders adds further evidence that their current clinical boundaries do not reflect distinct underlying pathogenic processes, at least on the genetic level. This suggests a deeply interconnected nature for psychiatric disorders, in contrast to neurological disorders, and underscores the need to refine psychiatric diagnostics. Genetically informed analyses may provide important "scaffolding" to support such restructuring of psychiatric nosology, which likely requires incorporating many levels of information. By contrast, we find limited evidence for widespread common genetic risk sharing among neurological disorders or across neurological and psychiatric disorders. We show that both psychiatric and neurological disorders have robust correlations with cognitive and personality measures. Further study is needed to evaluate whether overlapping genetic contributions to psychiatric pathology may influence treatment choices. Ultimately, such developments may pave the way toward reduced heterogeneity and improved diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric disorders

Atrial fibrillation genetic risk differentiates cardioembolic stroke from other stroke subtypes

AbstractObjectiveWe sought to assess whether genetic risk factors for atrial fibrillation can explain cardioembolic stroke risk.MethodsWe evaluated genetic correlations between a prior genetic study of AF and AF in the presence of cardioembolic stroke using genome-wide genotypes from the Stroke Genetics Network (N = 3,190 AF cases, 3,000 cardioembolic stroke cases, and 28,026 referents). We tested whether a previously-validated AF polygenic risk score (PRS) associated with cardioembolic and other stroke subtypes after accounting for AF clinical risk factors.ResultsWe observed strong correlation between previously reported genetic risk for AF, AF in the presence of stroke, and cardioembolic stroke (Pearson’s r=0.77 and 0.76, respectively, across SNPs with p &lt; 4.4 × 10−4 in the prior AF meta-analysis). An AF PRS, adjusted for clinical AF risk factors, was associated with cardioembolic stroke (odds ratio (OR) per standard deviation (sd) = 1.40, p = 1.45×10−48), explaining ∼20% of the heritable component of cardioembolic stroke risk. The AF PRS was also associated with stroke of undetermined cause (OR per sd = 1.07, p = 0.004), but no other primary stroke subtypes (all p &gt; 0.1).ConclusionsGenetic risk for AF is associated with cardioembolic stroke, independent of clinical risk factors. Studies are warranted to determine whether AF genetic risk can serve as a biomarker for strokes caused by AF.</jats:sec

Households, Time, and Practice: A Reply to Vitelli

Giovanna Vitelli (this volume) offers interesting perspectives on the archaeological study of Indigenous people in colonial contexts. She does so through a commentary on my recently published (Silliman 2009) article in which I outlined a perspective on practice and memory that has helped me interpret the ways that Indigenous communities can persist between the dichotomies of change and continuity. I offer here some clarifications and engagements with her comments

Culture Contact or Colonialism? Challenges in the Archaeology of Native North America

What has frequently been termed contact-period archaeology has assumed a prominent role in North American archaeology in the last two decades. This article examines the conceptual foundation of archaeological culture contact studies by sharpening the terminological and interpretive distinction between contact and colonialism. The conflation of these two terms, and thereby realms of historical experience, has proven detrimental to archaeologists\u27 attempts to understand indigenous and colonial histories. In light of this predicament, the article tackles three problems with treating colonialism as culture contact: (1) emphasizing short-term encounters rather than long-term entanglements, which ignores the process and heterogeneous forms of colonialism and the multifaceted ways that indigenous people experienced them; (2) down-playing the severity of interaction and the radically different levels of political power, which does little to reveal how Native people negotiated complex social terrain but does much to distance contact studies from what should be a related research focus in the archaeology of African enslavement and diaspora; and (3) privileging predefined cultural traits over creative or creolized cultural products, which loses sight of the ways that social agents lived their daily lives and that material culture can reveal, as much as hide, the subtleties of cultural change and continuity. /// Lo que frecuentemente se denomina arqueología del período de contacto ha adquirido en los últimos 20 años un papel prominente en la arqueología norteamericana. Este trabajo examina el legado conceptual de los estudios arqueológicos sobre el contacto cultural y aclara la importante distinción terminológica e interpretativa entre contacto y colonialismo. La tendencia a confundir ambos conceptos, y por lo tanto el mundo de las experiencias históricas, ha perjudicado el intento arqueológico por comprender tanto la historia indígena como la colonial. Bajo semejante predicamento, este artículo aborda tres problemas que se generan al equiparar colonialismo con contacto cultural: (1) poner énfasis en los encuentros de poca duración--en vez de las relaciones prolongadas--lo que ignora las formas y los procesos heterogéneos del colonialismo, así como las múltiples dimensiones de las experiencias indígenas, (2) poner menor atención a la intensidad de la interacción y a los grados de poder político tan diferentes, lo que no permite apreciar cómo la gente autóctona negoció en contextos sociales complejos, promoviendo además un distanciamiento entre los estudios de contacto y las investigaciones afines sobre la arqueología de la esclavitud y diásporas africanas; y (3) privilegiar rasgos culturales predefinidos sobre formas culturales novedosas o criollas, lo que impide apreciar las formas en las que agentes sociales vivieron sus quehaceres cotidianos, olvidando a la vez que la cultura material puede revelar, así como ocultar, las sutilezas del cambio cultural y de la continuidad